Do you? Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you

with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

W.W. history of philosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about

the Roman Stoics with Dr. John Sellers, who is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of

the West of England.

Hi John, thanks for coming.

Hi Peter.

Right, well on the podcast so far, I've already devoted episodes to the three main Roman Stoics, namely

Sanica, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, and that's really who we're mostly going to be talking

about.

Would you say that these three figures represent a widespread

enthusiasm for Stoicism in this early period of the Roman Empire? Well I

think there was a wide interest in Stoicism in that period and those three figures are the three we most associate with that period because we have substantial texts for them.

But there are a number of other Roman Stoics, minor figures that we know a little less about,

that we might also mention to kind of flesh out the picture of Roman interest in Stoicism at that time.

So if we go back a little earlier to the first century BC,

a very famous Roman Cato the Younger,

an associate of Cicero, was a very keen advocate of stoicism, and the later

Roman Stoics are great admirers of him as a figure, and around the turn of the millennium, we have information about a school of Stoicism based in Rome,

run by a philosopher called Quintus Sextius, two of whose pupils went on to teach Seneca.

And a little later, we have another Roman Stoic, Musonius Rufus, an Etruscan Aristocrat who lectured on Stoicism in Rome and whose lecturers

Epictetus attended. So there are quite a few other Roman Stoics in this period and

...